We have been obliged to take notice of the extraordinary tendency of American women to cultivation, to the improvement of the mind, by means of reading, clubs, and other intellectual exercises, and to acknowledge that they are leaving the men behind; that is, the men not in the so-called professions.  Is this intellectualization beginning to show in the conversation of women when they are together, say in the hours of relaxation in the penetralia spoken of, or in general society?  Is there less talk about the fashion of dress, and the dearness or cheapness of materials, and about servants, and the ways of the inchoate citizen called the baby, and the infinitely little details of the private life of other people?  Is it true that if a group of men are talking, say about politics, or robust business, or literature, and they are joined by women (whose company is always welcome), the conversation is pretty sure to take a lower mental plane, to become more personal, more frivolous, accommodating itself to quite a different range?  Do the well-read, thoughtful women, however beautiful and brilliant and capable of the gayest persiflage, prefer to talk with men, to listen to the conversation of men, rather than to converse with or listen to their own sex?  If this is true, why is it?  Women, as a rule, in “society” at any rate, have more leisure than men.  In the facilities and felicities of speech they commonly excel men, and usually they have more of that vivacious dramatic power which is called “setting out a thing to the life.”  With all these advantages, and all the world open to them in newspapers and in books, they ought to be the leaders and stimulators of the best conversation.  With them it should never drop down to the too-common flatness and banality.  Women have made this world one of the most beautiful places of residence to be conceived.  They might make it one of the most interesting.

THE TALL GIRL

It is the fashion for girls to be tall.  This is much more than saying that tall girls are the fashion.  It means not only that the tall girl has come in, but that girls are tall, and are becoming tall, because it is the fashion, and because there is a demand for that sort of girl.  There is no hint of stoutness, indeed the willowy pattern is preferred, but neither is leanness suggested; the women of the period have got hold of the poet’s idea, “tall and most divinely fair,” and are living up to it.  Perhaps this change in fashion is more noticeable in England and on the Continent than in America, but that may be because there is less room for change in America, our girls being always of an aspiring turn.  Very marked the phenomenon is in England; on the street, at any concert or reception, the number of tall girls is so large as to occasion remark, especially among the young girls just coming into the conspicuousness of womanhood.  The tendency of the new generation is towards unusual height and gracious slimness.